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New Farm Research Project!
To date, Rich Earth has mainly tested and applied urine as a fertilizer for hay fields, using our custom-designed application equipment. (We have also used urine fertilizers for carrots and lettuce as part of our pharmaceutical testing trials.) In this project, we will test urine on a variety of new crops including corn, hemp, cut flowers, and greenhouse figs. We’ll also test different types of application equipment, including liquid manure applicators and several different drip irrigation (fertigation) systems at both lab and field scale.
The project is a collaborative study involving partner farmers in all the stages of planning and execution. This enables us to continue our ongoing effort to meet farmer’s needs with our research. Our earlier focus groups and interviews with farmers indicated that while many are quite interested in using urine fertilizer, many wanted more concrete information on application methods and how specific crops respond. For this project, we will hold an initial meeting with all farmer participants to determine the details of the specific on-farm demonstration experiments. During the field season, we will conduct site visits and interviews with farmer-participants to document their observations and experiences. Finally, at the end of the project we’ll gather everyone together again to compare experiences. And we look forward to hosting a field day next fall at one of these farms to share results with other interested farmers and agricultural educators!
The project, “Expanding Farm Partnerships to Trial Human-Urine-Derived Fertilizer on New Crops” is funded through a $28,187 Partnership grant from Northeast SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program, which is part of USDA. This is our fifth SARE grant; you can read the final reports from our previous grants online.
